Price talks to Irene, an assistant professor, who noted that in a college-sponsored survey more than half of professors at the college she taught at noted they thought that it was an unfair advantage for students to receive accommodations. This lead Irene to decide she was not going to talk about or disclose her own disability to her colleagues. Similar uncertainty lead to other faculty who did disclose their disability to either not disclose via email so that there wouldn't be a paper trail or live in fear that their disability disclosure could impact their ability to get tenure.

Example of Ambient Uncertainty (Irene)

For faculty and graduate students who are immigrants, there is not just anxiety about how disability disclosure would impact their job but, also whether it could impact their ability to get a visa, or even get accommodations and disability services back in their home country, depending on whether they are diagnosed. Additionally, ambient uncertainty is compounded for scholars who are Black, Indigenous, or otherwise a person of colour, and scholars of marginalized genders as ambient uncertainty compounds with other microaggressions and previous harms of the academic system. 

Ambient Uncertainty within Intersecting Systems of Oppression

Price notes that consequences do not have to occur for ambient uncertainty to exist as long as the risk of consequences happening is always there. 

Ambient Uncertainty and Consequences

Ambient uncertainty can also occur across time; for instance, previous marginalizing experiences can lead to the perception of a consistent risk of that marginalization occuring again. Alternatively, previous marginalization (for instance, not being accommodated at work) can lead to more marginalization (for instance, experiencing poverty).

Ambient Uncertainty and Time

Price contends that based on the discussion of harm, and the need to explicitly include harm in our discussions of space that we must also include harm in our discussions of ambient uncertainty, because sigificant harm can occur through ambient uncertainty.

Ambient Uncertainty and Harm

Price notes ambient uncertainty can also come from the precarity of the possibility of current supports (like accommodations or disability related health benefits) suddenly disappearing because of either bureaucratic redetermination of if someone is eligible or caps on the among of a resource an individual is allowed to use.

Ambient Uncertainty and Bureaucratic Systems

Some participants noted that there was a sense of risk or vulnerability around disability that came from a sense of general opinion of people within the institution coming from features of the space around them, rather than any single instance of something being said or done to them.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

The subcodes Price included under Space were:
- Ambient uncertainty
- Arrangement of bodyminds or objects in a space
- Designated physical or online space
- Metaphorical space
- Mobility in space  (both physical and digital)
- Past or future spaces
- Surveillance in space (both physical and digital)
- Space- Other

Space Subcodes

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

Crip Spacetime

Price posits that harm is an essential part of how space has been constructed in academia and that those who exist in crip spacetime move through spaces that have been built in and through harm and experience harm in spaces that is created through space's interaction with history, relations, objects, and geometries. 

Space and Crip Spacetime

Price notes that in Disability Studies, mobility refers to whether an individual's bodymind moves in a particular way, for instance walking or rolling. Mobility is also used in disability studies as a category, for instance mobility disability.

Mobility in Disability Studies

Price notes that space and surveillance often overlap, especially in academia, where academic institutions have historic and thematic ties to carceral institutions.

Intertwining of Space and Surveillance

Ambient Uncertainty

Tanya Titchkosky points out that academic spaces that harm disabled people are not often made with the expressed intent of being harmful to disabled people - rather, they have been organized by the possibility of not perceiving how the situations are harmful. In an organized possibility of not perceiving harm - e.g. not having a door large enough for a wheelchair user - the harm is not intended, but the environment is set up in a way where the harm is not readily perceived by those not experiencing it. Price notes by foregrounding harm we can work to undo this organized possibility of not perceiving.

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